In 2018,
The Hill announced
Krystal Ball and
Buck Sexton as presenters of a new slate of original programming to be produced by
John Solomon.
Rising launched in June 2018 as
Rising with Krystal & Buck with Buck Sexton as host. Sexton departed in June 2019, with
Saagar Enjeti replacing him. In the press release, Ball was slated as the "progressive co-host on a
morning show with a conservative co-host". The show focused on attacking "establishment Democrats such as Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg." In late 2019, it had an average of 600,000 viewers daily. , the Hill's YouTube channel averaged 1.48 million views per day, and had around 1.2 million subscribers. Enjeti and Ball also co-authored a book, ''The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising''. In 2020, the show did a few
live-stream analysis programs for important political events like the
2020 Democratic primary and the
2020 general elections. In March 2022,
YouTube suspended
Risings channel for seven days for allegedly "violating the platform's rules around election misinformation". Then-
Rising host
Ryan Grim stated in
The Intercept: "Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President
Donald Trump's recent speech at the
Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. Second,
Rising played a minutelong clip of Trump's commentary on
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if not for a "rigged election.""
Since 2021 In May 2021, Ball and Enjeti announced they were departing
Rising in order to release their own independent project,
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar. They were temporarily replaced with Ryan Grim and
The Federalist editor
Emily Jashinsky. In July 2021,
Kim Iversen took over from Jashinsky, who said on
Twitter that she had never intended to do
Rising full time. According to
The Daily Beast, Iversen was a controversial figure: Aside from her
COVID-19 vaccine skepticism, she also sparked complaints from Hill employees after she defended the
Chinese government’s harsh treatment of Uyghurs (prompting co-host Ryan Grim to push back on-air) and seemed to peddle
pro-Russian propaganda about
Ukraine... [and] Iversen recently got into a back-and-forth with fellow
Rising co-host
Olayemi Olurin over
deadnaming actor
Elliot Page. Grim and Jashinsky, who were the regular Friday hosts of
Rising, resigned in September 2022. Also in September 2022,
Rising refused to air a segment on their show in which left-wing political commentator
Katie Halper called
Israel an "apartheid government". She was subsequently fired from the show. As of 2023, Jessica Burbank and Amber Duke presented
Rising on Fridays. On June 7, 2024, Briahna Joy Gray, who had frequently courted controversy during the 2023
Gaza war, was fired from
Rising after allegedly dismissing trauma and
rolling her eyes during an interview with the sister of an
Israeli woman held hostage by Hamas, who urged her to
believe Israeli women's accounts of
sexual assault on October 7. ==Hosts==